In Upset, Comedians Are Voted Governors of Tokyo, Osaka

In a rebellion against established political parties, Japan’s mushrooming body of unaffiliated voters elected comedians as governors of both Tokyo and Osaka on Sunday.

The upsets in Japan’s two most populous states stunned Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s Socialists and his senior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, who supported longtime bureaucrats in both races.

In Tokyo, Yukio Aoshima, 62, a male comedian and writer who rose to fame playing the title role in the TV show “Mean Old Granny” and was elected to the upper house of Parliament for the first time in 1968, won handily against a candidate who had served seven prime ministers at the top of the nation’s professional bureaucracy.

In Osaka, Nokku (Knock) Yokoyama--a storytelling comedian whose real name is Isamu Yamada--also beat a retired bureaucrat despite entering the election three days before the campaign started. Yokoyama had served 24 years in the upper house of Parliament.

Aoshima, who once branded the late Prime Minister Eisaku Sato “a male concubine of the zaikai (business world)” and described Japan’s democracy as “of the zaikai, by the zaikai and for the zaikai, “ made it clear that he will bring a dramatically different style to the Tokyo governorship.

He said he will try to cancel a six-month exposition that his predecessor had planned for next year to hail the completion of a massive waterfront renovation program in Tokyo. He also declared that he will not release a scheduled Tokyo contribution of $300 million to a government-planned bailout of two Tokyo-supervised credit unions.

The bailout has been described as vital to the security of Japan’s financial system.

Aoshima said Tokyo politicians of both the ruling and opposition forces “colluded” in selecting the nation’s top bureaucrat as their candidate and tried to foist him on voters because they wanted a governor who would “obey their orders.”

“Such collusion makes fools of the voters. The parties no longer have individual policies and have lost their reason for existence. . . . This is against the rules of democracy. The people rebelled against it, and their resentment came to focus on support for me,” said Aoshima, who ran without the backing of any party and restricted his campaign to state-financed posters and TV spots.

He said he won “not because unaffiliated voters don’t care about politics but because existing parties didn’t earn their trust.”

Despite the support of five ruling and opposition parties, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobuo Ishihara, 68, received only 27% of the votes to Aoshima’s 37%.

In Osaka, Yokoyama won by an even bigger margin, 48% to 34%.